


lay there in your brain

by ishie



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, Tropes, tumblrfics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-27
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-15 03:29:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/522655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><a href="http://ndnickerson.tumblr.com/">ndnickerson</a> asked for: Suits amnesiafic? Would that even work? ;)</p>
            </blockquote>





	lay there in your brain

For years, Donna’s worst nightmare—worse even than radioactive clowns, Macy’s-parade-float-sized pigeons, and breaking a heel on every single pair of Manolos in her closet—has been having to choose between what she wants and what she has. The day was always going to come when she had to make a choice, when it would be a real choice, when it would break her heart to pick one over the other.

That’s not to say it’s been easy so far, the few times she’s had to choose. It’s pretty much been the epitome of not easy, but she’s always managed to do it with as little grief as possible. There’s a world of difference between turning down Greg’s proposal when she wasn’t even sure she loved him, and making the decision to throw out the years she spent clawing her way up the assistants’ ladder at the DA’s office to follow Harvey, and … well, and _this_.

It feels like she’s ripping her own chest in half to walk out the door, to heave her overstuffed bag into the back of a cab, and stare at the streetlights all the way home. It’s the right decision to make—she knows that. She _knows it_.

The worst part is Donna isn’t sure which breaks her heart more: the walking out or all the fighting that’s to come as she convinces herself not to go back and say she’s sorry, to take back the words and make a different decision again.

Or is it that after everything, after all the times she’s tried to explain it, he will never understand that she isn’t picking Harvey over him? That she’s not choosing the job or the office or another man, that she’s choosing herself instead?

That forcing her to choose is why she has to leave?

It isn’t until the cabbie turns to talk to her through the glass with a look of concern that Donna realizes she’s started crying. She’s like some disintegrating damsel escaped from a Tennessee Williams play as she weeps in the backseat and the cabbie keeps asking, “You okay, lady? You okay? You’ll be okay, Donna. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Of course it will,” she mutters when Harvey keeps saying it, again and again. “I’m Donna. I’m always okay.”

Harvey laughs, the way she knew he would, even though her head feels like it’s splitting in two and there’s an unnatural heaviness in her leg. And throbbing. So much throbbing it feels like her heart’s relocated to her knee.

She cracks an eye open and peers down to find most of her right leg encased in a bright blue plaster cast, and Harvey, disheveled and pale, perched on the end of the bed like he’s not sure it will support his weight.

Which, seeing as it’s a _hospital bed_ , it probably will.

“Okay might have been an overstatement,” she says. Her voice cracks a little at the end, more from the incredible thirst that’s turned her mouth to sand than anything else. The last thing she remembers is leaving the office early to make it to a new Zumba class by the park, but now she can see bare branches outside. She woke up that morning to bright blue skies and muggy heat, but now there’s a sharpness to the air that screams autumn. All of that can wait, though, because _what the hell._

“You were in an accident. A bad one.”

“Uh, duh. What’s the damage?”

“Broken leg. Cuts and bruises. Concussion but no internal bleeding. You’ve been admitted for observation but the doctor says you should be good to go home soon.”

“Soon-soon, or when the insurance runs out soon?”

“As soon as we can get you set up with some crutches and a couch that doesn’t suck.”

“My couch doesn’t suck! You’ve never even seen my couch.”

“Donna, you bought it off a guy who hadn’t left his apartment in forty-two years.”

Forty-seven, actually, and it’s an honest-to-god late-nineteenth-century Chippendale that once sat in the lobby at the Plaza, but all Donna does is roll her eyes, which isn’t a great idea because it sets the whole room to spinning and Harvey lurches to one side.

No, wait, that’s all her.

The next time she wakes up, Harvey’s moved to the chair next to the window, and he’s snoring like … well, like Harvey. The pain in her head is gone, or more likely masked by some really good drugs because she can’t feel her leg either, thank God.

She tries to remember what happened between the office and this hospital room, but all she gets for her trouble is a renewed headache and panic starting to leak in. Was she hit by a car crossing the street? A truck? A train?

“Garbage truck t-boned your cab,” Harvey tells her, after she wakes him up by lobbing an empty plastic pitcher somewhere near his head. “I know you’re playing hurt here but your aim is terrible.”

“Why was I in a cab? What day is it?”

“October second? Third?” He checks his watch and frowns. “Third, but just barely.”

October? That means she’s lost almost four months! She couldn’t have been here that whole time; her body aches but it doesn’t feel weakened at all, and Harvey’s only a few days past needing to shave. A few days of sitting by her bedside, she can almost understand, but months? No way. Not even for Donna would he take himself out of the game that long.

Her confusion must be written all over her face, because Harvey seamlessly shifts into smooth operator mode, taking her hand and using his lawyer voice to explain that the accident happened on Saturday morning, and now it’s Tuesday, and the doctor said that the blow to her head might cause some retrograde amnesia, but it was nothing to worry about, she really wasn’t missing much in those couple of months, just the Arbora merger, and on and on and _on_. Donna stops listening pretty quickly—she’s never liked being on the receiving end of the Harvey Specter, Esquire, treatment and something about the way he won’t quite meet her eyes makes the cold knot of panic in her chest grow even larger.

She is missing something in those lost months. She can feel it. Something huge, something wonderful and awful, like it’s fighting its way out of the dark hole where she’s lost it. It might have been all quiet on the legal front, but that’s not all there is to her life. There would have been Shakespeare in the Park and a long weekend at home with her parents and brunches with the rest of the girls who run midtown. There would have been dates. Lots of dates, because Donna does not do the alone thing for long. Never has, never will. But there’s no guy lurking outside the room, and Harvey’s not just here, he looks like he hasn’t left in days, which doesn’t leave a lot of space or time for anybody else.

There is, however, a huge pot of creamy hydrangeas sitting on the counter outside the room’s tiny bathroom, so there must be _someone_. The only time she gets flowers from Harvey is when she orders them herself, and even on his credit card she never splurges on anything this nice. Someone at the firm might have arranged to have them delivered, but she’s positive no one there knows how much she loves hydrangeas.

Harvey interrupts the runaway train of her thoughts, “Hey, I’m going to see if I can scare up your doctor. Unless you want to go back to sleep?”

Donna pushes herself up a little higher in the bed, ignoring the twinges of pain that are radiating from almost every inch of her body. “God, no. I’ve slept enough. Go!”

The sky outside the window is dark, the bare branches darker still against it. She drifts into a doze and back out again before Harvey returns. It’s hard not to, between the painkillers that are still dulling the throb in her leg and the relative hush of the hospital around her. When she hears footsteps outside the door, though, she forces her eyes open. There aren’t enough answers in the world to satisfy the questions she has right now, but whatever the doctor has to say is going to be a good start.

**Author's Note:**

> ...I just used Gucci Mane lyrics for a fic title. This is the rock bottom, right?


End file.
